AX 2009

There were lotsa stuff I was dying to post about while I was in china, but I forgot most of it. So I'll post about AX instead.


Thursday:
-Arrived at AX with Lev at around noontime, expecting the huge legendary 2 hour line Lev was telling me he had to go through yesterday. Except there was no line and I got my badge in 3 seconds. Hurray!
-Went to the arcade and console room for a bit to see what they have. No MB:AA awwww :V
-Attempted the Mois Dix Mois concert (or whatever it is). The crossdressing amused me but I couldn't say the same for the music, so 10 minutes into the concert I told Lev I was leaving for the exhibit hall.
-Exhibit hall had... different stuff this year. There weren't as commercial anime and manga booths but there was a lot of doujin booths, cosplay booths, and product advertisement booths. In fact there were more doujin booths than anime and manga booths, which is pretty odd in itself. AX is getting more otaku?
- Artist Alley was directly connected to Exhibit hall without needing to exit. Makes it convenient since I can just walk over and meet my friends from anime club at their booth!
-After the concert was (almost) finished Lev called and said he was done so we went to the console game room and set up EFZ on his computer until 20 minutes later the AX people told us we weren't allowed to set up consoles in the console gaming room and kicked us out. :V
-So we played EFZ outside of the console gaming room! Gathered some interested people. I was originally gonna goto the ANN panel but didn't because there were doujin games!
-Well, until two guys kept hogging the computer so we decided to move after we ate dinner (me: sandwich Lev: some bad chinese food) and moved into the line for the... doujin panel, and set up to play doujin games until the panel started. :V
-The panel was sad, because the main guy who knows everything about doujins and was responsible for founding the company was not available so basically we just got information about what they're releasing and what the price was and that was it. Stuff we could have found out just by going to their booth!
-Then we were thinking of going to the JAST panel but because I still had jetlag and he wasn't that interested we ditched that.

Friday:
-Woke up at 10:15 and was like OH SHI GUESS I CAN'T COSPLAY TODAY as I rushed me and my sister out the door to pick up Lev.
-Called Lev at like 11:20 AM and he was like OH SHI I JUST WOKE UP and hurried downstairs to meet up with us.
-Went to Mr. Pizza and attempted to eat everything and leave in 30 minutes. Didn't exactly work too well because of the glory of LA downtown traffic, something every tourist must see.
-We got to the convention at 12:20 but Lev still managed to make the touhou gathering (which was around 12 PM starting time) so he was happy.
-As for everything else, I went in line for the Morning Musume concert (outside, wtf) while my sister browsed the exhibit hall. Then after much agony and epicfailure20dollarparking, we finally got in.
-Morning Musume is not a bad group, though one may say they have a bit too much people in it. This can be a good or a bad thing; good in that if some of the singers mess up they can cover for it really quickly with the other singers (and sometimes it seemed in the concert that not every person got their pitch right). Also good in that they can cover multiple keys all at one time due to the amount of people they have, and since they have so much people it sounds quite different than say, just a group of 4 singers doing it. Also, I imagine they don't tire out as easily since not everyone is singing all the time; the amount of time each singer is singing is dramatically reduced with that much people.
-Lotsa people is BAD in that we don't know who to look at when they're singing. One person is suddenly singing and then sudden suddenly, she stops and it switches to the other person on the other side singing! Even the cameraman was having a hard time trying to find which person he was supposed to focus on! The other thing that is probably difficult is both dancing and singing at the same time with so much people on the stage, but luckily no one collided with each other. Their coreography can definately be said to be rather impressive, for them to be singing and moving around all at the same time.
-There were CHINESE GIRLS in the Morning Musume band! :D No wonder they're popular in China.
-Afterwards we went to a gathering that almost didn't happen. Spatula wanted to goto a trivia panel but that got cancelled, and he was quite annoyed about that. But in any case he decided he'd goto the gathering where we all went to play EFZ with Raven and co. Details of that are on efz forums.

Saturday:
-Didn't leave the house until about 1 PM because we wanted to eat lunch at home(12 dollar parking, remember, didn't want to go in and out for lunch) and get dressed up.
-FYI my suit was a cheap imitation Black Butler suit missing one obvious coat. The vest and shirt were part of my sister's orchestra uniform; the black tie was bought in china for 2 dollars, the gloves for 50 cents; the pants were just formal pants, as would have been the shoes if I could have found them. Also, a fake watch that's supposed to be for FMA cosplay instead of Black Butler... :V
-When we got to the convention my sister went to a photo shoot that a person from last year requested while I went to a mini concert, which was fine but, I felt, was not really anything special. The music was nice though.
-Then we went around looking for manga (in particular, fruits basket). As already stated, there weren't alot of manga booths and we only found 21, so we chose other manga as well.
-During the period of time my sister was here (about 2 hours, 1 hour with me) only TWO people took pictures of me and my sister together; one was some lucky anime club friend that actually found us, the other was a bystander at that time (where I was like "wtf, why us, you obviously have better things to take pictures of"). This is a GOOD thing since I don't like people taking pictures of me, but I did like dressing up. :D
-After that I hung out at the artist alley to talk with some anime club friends and went around a bit. Bought Suguri+Acceleration just because it was cheap, and Airade Summer because it was at the same booth and it was also relatively cheap. Watched a Sakuya IaMP player try Lunatic Story Mode with much fail! But we felt sympathy for him!
-When the exhibit hall closed I met some friends that I used to play Ragnarok Online with and took pictures with them. Then they left to play majong/have a barbeque.
-Met up with Lev again and went to the Vocaloid panel.
-The Vocaloid Panel was quite impressive. It almost makes up for the lack of concerts this year, in a way that it was like Miku was giving out a concert of her own. They showed some of the popular videos everyone has seen in DVD quality, as well as a few really good Miku videos that I've never seen before. In addition they had some nice comments from the creators of the music and videos to the American fans, which is always nice to see. The organizer of the panel is Japanese so I guess that's why it went so well? Not to be racist or anything. :V But yes! Lev liked it too! I think.
-After that went to Mangagamer panel. Shuffle got licensed. Higarashi doujin got licensed. Producer does not like child pornography laws extending into anime. And they're trying to do something with AI Space? ...I'd be REALLY IMPRESSED if they can get that off.

Sunday
-After I came to pick up Lev and check on things at my apartment, we left for AX and entered exhibit hall. Lev bought stuff, I didn't. Overall did not see too much stuff that impressed us, but we did find overpriced AIR DVDs!!
-Then went to the spot in front of the console gaming room to play some final moments in EFZ (since we can't do that in netplay very well). FFD joined us later. It was all much fun.
-We then went to Curry house to eat lunch, and was like "OH SHI THE TIME IS ALREADY 2 PM" and ate as quickly as possible (his flight was at 4 PM). Then we left, but not before stopping and Kinokuniya to get those Fruits Basket books that my sister couldn't find at AX!!!
-AHAHA WELL I GOT LOST TRYING TO TAKE HIM TO THE AIRPORT. Or rather I just missed the 105 and went all the way to San Pedro. SO IT WAS AN EXTRA FINAL SCENIC TOUR OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WHILE TALKING ABOUT TOUHOU.
-We got there barely in the nick of time (3:20) and he left for his flight. Then I called him and told him he forgot his figurine in my car and he was like ":V". So, we're going to talk about what to do about that later tonight.

Anything else?
-Theme of this con is definately playing. Whether its playing games or cosplaying, there's always some sort of "play" going on. For the gaming aspect, there was the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue thing that I didn't really care about, but not only that, there was just a lot of fun gaming in general. Lev carried his laptop around everywhere so whenever we found a free moment we just sat down where we were, plugged the laptop in and started playing games, and people would start coming around and watch us. That, along with the gathering and throw in the mangagamer games as well, makes for a very enjoyable time at AX despite its crappy outcome this year.
-For the cosplaying aspect, it seemed like 60% of the population of AX was cosplaying of some sort. There were some good cosplayers, although I didn't take pictures (because for the first two days I FORGOT MY CAMERA AND WAS SO EPICALLY DISAPPOINTED SINCE THERE WAS A PRETTY GOOD HETALIA GROUP THAT I COULD HAVE SHOWN MY FRIEND). And of course, I cosplayed too... V: